WASHINGTON - As promised, Elizabeth Warren has left blood and teeth on the floor.

During the final debate over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, before Warren was a senator, she was asked about an attempt to defang the unborn agency. "My first choice is a strong consumer agency. My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor,” she said at the time, comments that were unsuccessfully used against her in her subsequent campaign.

This week, she fought to keep a major Wall Street giveaway out of a must-pass spending bill and by Friday night it was clear the fight was lost. So Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, took the Senate floor and unleashed a haymaker on Wall Street giant Citigroup that will leave a mark for an awfully long time.

After listing the top Citi executives who have gone on to work in the Obama administration, she addressed Citi directly, noting that she agreed that Wall Street reform wasn’t perfect. “I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. It should have broken you into pieces,” she said.

Elizabeth Warren <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/financial-product-safety_n_173691" target="_hplink">announced</a> a bill creating a Financial Product Safety Commission with House and Senate Democrats in March 2009. The body was designed to have oversight over mortgages and other financial instruments to protect consumers against predatory practices. She said if the agency had existed before the subprime collapse then "there would have been millions of families who got tangled in predatory mortgages who never would have gotten them." HuffPost's Ryan Grim <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/financial-product-safety_n_173691" target="_hplink">reported</a>:
Without all these toxic assets on banks' balance sheets, the institutions wouldn't be on the brink of collapse and the recession would be more manageable. "Consumer financial products were the front end of the destabilization of the American economic system."
Sen. Charles Schumer's cosponsorship of the bill is notable because of his proximity to Wall Street. The bill's merit, the New York Democrat said, is that it regulates the actual financial product rather than the company producing it.